>My sense (guess) is that you, like most people, learned programming from the outset using the procedural/imperative style.

>FP is, at its core, far FAR simpler than procedural/imperative/whatever-you-want-to-call-it programming. It requires high school math, if that.

These two factors do not go together in my opinion. Most people who learn imperative programming have studied mathenatics for a dozen years beforehand, but somehow learning imperative programming for a year "ruins" their ability to understand FP permanently? This sounds like an excuse to explain why people have poor performance when they learn FP.

From my experience people do have poor preformance with FP. Back in uni we had a class for FP. If there's anything the majority of students took away from that class, it's that they're never going to touch Haskell again. Because the average performance was that poor.